Interview with Christopher Engman

CRO/CMO Proof Analytics

Video Transcript

hi this is Bob Samuels founder of tech connector tech connector is a marketplace and campaign management platform of Best of Breed account based marketing lead generation solutions we’ve partnered with the b2b sales and marketing exchange to bring you wisdom from leading account based marketing thought leaders to that end I’m happy to introduce you to Christopher inkman chief revenue officer and chief marketing officer of proof analytics he’s also author of the book mega deals how multi-billion dollar deals are done Christopher it’s a pleasure to speak with you how are you today great yeah likewise I’m doing really well but a wedding yesterday not my own but we sit at the wedding your import to go we’re here for that betting aunt wedding in for a quick you haven’t you again remember it with you I do yeah I have a bunch of kids and my wife and we’re also here with another family so usually have both an assistant and an old pair so pretty very nice but this time we decided that none of them would follow which was probably some kind of mistake no I he’s a really nice time with the kids but it’s kind of hundred some kids I think a great bonding opportunity thank you for yeah I know some time for us I appreciate it and of course yeah so could you give our audience a little bit of a background your background about marketing a BM in particular yeah so he got into marketing around larger deals maybe around 2000 when I started my first software company it was enterprise software and I was selling into the big retailers like the Tesco’s and the big fashion readers and all those and realized how hard I mean how he said watch to get if you really go for it how easy it was to get me things with the right people but then hard was to go from there to to closing a deal and then I managed to I had a pause a bit in my entrepreneurial career I was a CIO and had a customer loyalty for a big fashion retailer so I was all of a sudden on the buying side and I saw with my own eyes what happens around the larger deals and how the how the decision making is really going and on the surface you want to show that you’re really fact-based but in reality it’s lots of politics various agendas much more people involved and you think and the budget owner is rarely a sole decision maker many junior salespeople think it’s yeah we’re talking to the right person here she’s making the session like yeah sure and I was a CIO I had I was part of the c-suite even though I was only 26 that was pretty young but I had on paper lots of budget responsibilities but in reality I decided very little so things like that were big realizations for myself and to some extent prior to that my first company that sold into retail kind of yeah it’s a successful company today but myself I didn’t succeed well with it and one of the reasons what was that I couldn’t scale and the price sales and marketing so I had a lot of sales team team members but I ended up having to sell myself all the time so I couldn’t scale it in the beginning I thought I was particularly good but in there after a while I realized no I suck if I can’t scale this I it’s game over so and we actually fail the first time so we had to start over and and second time it worked out but but that was kind of the context for me that led me and then I started another enterprise software company we don’t have to go into that but that I was also mostly selling into partner owned companies and that decision-making is making is even trickier with again agendas and stuff yeah I was going to say I guess my daughter you can probably cut that out so a B in the word takes me out sometimes because often it’s not so much about marketing to try to get new prospects but actually getting deeper into customers that are already on board Landon of course yeah oh yeah the land and expand this is learning expand that that’s where you have the big money so we’re with our court the landing or the expanding know it’s typical said well both are equally difficult but the big money is in the expanding it’s so just to finish off my story that so that actually led to me starting a company called and the more we started in November 2007 it was more or less the same I mean few days as demand they started so we’re kind of the first product ABM companies in the world and we got eventually over 100 fortune 500 companies unfortunately well I I don’t regret it because I had to get my first kind of few million dollars but I sold it too early and the buyer I don’t think they did a phenomenal job and developing it further but that’s maybe a personal thing but but anyway we we were pretty successful we got a lot of American companies worked with us both in Silicon Valley in Boston area and New York etc and we particularly good at really large companies doing ABM anyway so yeah going back to your question so canvas marketing is particularly good in 3 so 2 out of three big faces so if you take from awareness to closing your first deal with a completely new account acephate that’s phase one phase two is to take that not sorry to take that again so the phase one is to go from unaware into becoming a lead than to go in from lead into becoming a deal and then to go from a deal to like you said land and expand kind of expand that deal ABM is particularly good at the second the last two so it’s not phenomenal for lead generation especially if you calculate a cost per lead you use that metric ABM will come out pretty flat if you look at the win rate for accounts ABM is phenomenal it’s more expensive than many lead generation activities that you do but it has a higher win rate and some of the reasons why I account as marketing really works and the enterprise sales world is that first of all that five point seven decision-makers in our research around the mega deals book that does a kind of I don’t know where they got that number it’s not true simply not true in enterprise deals are much larger amount of people involved maybe if you sell some simple sauce stuff that’s that’s easier but and and well it’s a side note sauce doesn’t mean it can’t be enterprising sauce is often enterprise but as soon as you go into enterprise style deals there are more complex you have vast groups of people that you need to get on board not necessarily just sign the deal but you don’t want them to object to what you’re trying to achieve so you need to run a pretty significant consensus game to get people aligned and sales people typically pretty bad at that they’re kind of by default speaking to a to small amount of people and especially the junior ones to go back to the head of sales saying yeah Bob I I had a meeting now with missus or mr. X of this company and she was really positive I think we’ll close the deal with them as a senior sales leader you’re like right because you know that from having one person signaling an interest until you have a signed contract that’s a pretty long journey so and typically quite a few people involved so that those kind of areas are great for for ABM and the decision groups are way bigger the lobby groups around the deal are way bigger than any other gardeners and the guys are saying our research is showing that and constantly and also larger deals are a lot about mitigating risk and and being trussed forward yes a when their vendor so what we’ve seen in our research is that most big companies prefer to buy from a secure vendor rather than the extra bells and whistles so you can come as a dozen as a smaller company and this is a bit of a struggle and here here ABM can play a big role for small companies so a small company you can and I’m a part of such a company so I’m an investor in foil companies and one of them has a phenomenal product I mean they really wipe the floor with some of the biggest names in the IT industry but they’re small and they suffer from that so much there they look risky even though the if you look at the functionality demands they completely have a compliant all of them but that doesn’t matter they don’t win enough anyway because they’re losing on the credibility side so it’s a risk being low a reuleaux alternative is an immensely important in larger deals and and this is a spot where branding and marketing can really play a role because you can reduce this perceived risk by really good marketing especially if you do it at scale within the target organization and some are there some of the some of the ecosystem around that organization so it sounds like especially for smaller newer companies it makes sense to be more specific on the target company size that they should be going after yeah I mean as I made Mario Megamart exactly connected to connect that’s a good conclusion so to build your way up you should start with a mid-market I mean the small SME are typically not not capable of paying off so you should go for the kind of 52,000 employees and try to really gain momentum there and then you start to move the needle up step by step once you’ve gained credibility because they’re so I know I think you guys listening to this I’m sure you’ve been come across this a ton of time so trying to sell into a big brand a really pragmatic they it they’re like okay so who else have you sold in our industry and you go yeah but you have the symbol that you have seen their needs as our other clients coming from this other industry they’re like no no and you’re as an entrepreneur you can’t can be a bit a bit more wide thinking but then the buyer is like not on see a resemblance like we have nothing to do with an airline you’re like yeah but it’s the same problem like doesn’t matter we’re not in Maryland so and I’m sure you about I’ve seen this as well so a lot of your advice is to know your target audience and don’t I mean don’t waste your time where it’s just going to be hard work it’s a struggle and maybe work your way up there right yeah exactly I think you’re right I think it’s important to some people say you should never give up but that can be bad bad advice like the best salespeople we’ve studied in the mega deals research are great at exiting early so when they speak to you they have that there their checklist and you’re not taking all the boxes they exit they just you know in a subtle way move out and they go for the next company and the high performers and sales are having this behavior and and that is deaf to point applicable to selection of clients like if you are a smaller company even though it’s tempting to media to go for the Bank of America of the world but don’t just gain momentum in the mid markets and then you gradually move up there enough so for a company that’s larger or a company that’s ready to move up and they’re ready to go after the big folks you mentioned there’s a lot of decision makers a lot of people you have to reach out so there’s arguably dozens of different key stakeholders to reach out to different personas I assume in different pain points or different focuses maybe security or cost or or whatever but how do you identify who the right people are and what to talk about so this might be a bit boring advice but I think in the choice between being exactly to the point with the various persona and so to summarize it a bit I think it’s it’s more scalable and more effective to focus on the the pain points for the account in the marketing program whereas in sales you’re more persona oriented so I seen and during my ten years at bender more where we worked with over 100 fortune 500 companies I saw way too many companies being over sophisticated when it came to the analysis of the stakeholders and then trying to craft unique messages for the different type of type of personas that they failed on the execution so so my strong recommendation is to when doing ABM is to start with the display advertising and the social medias of the four social media channels kind of ABM where you’re very media based and you folks mostly on the the the accounts pain points whereas salespeople can take it one step further because the issue with the cannabis marketing is that it’s in theory perfect but in practice it’s imperfect so with what is a struggle is that marketing teams are speaking too little to sales teams and and also even if they do to execute campus marketing becomes really heavy unless you make a few brutal choices so my recommendation is to to actually not over over invest in the persona specific messaging in the marketing programs but use that instead in sales I know that a lot of people would say I’m wrong but this is definitely my experience and and I think what really gives you bang for the box is to get a compass marking to become an inherent part of your daily work and to get it to scale through your international organization so it becomes an integral part of what you do and to reach that point you need to simplify it a bit and when overdoing it like we could we could spend this talk on the most sophisticated stuff you can do around the campus marketing but that is not profitable for 99% of all the listeners the big man like I said per temple and sorry what did you say well I I get there’s a lot to be said for a simple yeah yeah yeah I think it’s the same you know in the book in our books mega deals that we’re just launching the EBM chapter yeah so we’ve interviewed so I started then the more but then we’ve interviewed people from the big big AVM vendors but also many of the known analysts around it from the campus marketing space from Sirius Forrester Gartner and the others but we’ve chosen to in that chapter describe it in a very pragmatic way so that the readers can implement it I’ve seen recommendations on campus marketing implementations that are mostly like okay this is Rick is really cool to say this but no one can run it so my view is more pragmatic like it’s what makes things successful is to get it into a habit when when when you do it when you excel at it and it’s becoming a habit of yours and a habit of your organization and not just your team but across countries etc and then you make some serious money on doing it and then you need to package it and simplify it a bit some pay for that long so as far as the the human side of this how do you see the coordination between sales and marketing who who does that well with good sales drive it to his marketing drive it is how do you get by right so this is an experience but we’ve seen both in the research and I was the most is this one we’re running blender more so often you benefit from having marketing lead a canvas marketing but have for example content creation don’t start with in the marketing team what you do instead is you have meetings with sales and you try to figure out what’s on the agenda of these accounts so let’s say you’re responsible for three accounts what’s what’s their different agendas and also what kind of stories can we make that they fit that agenda yes yeah make them yes so for example both in climb on and and and earlier and where when sales I’m working with two years and grew it from three to ninety million dollars first so we we start at all the and creation was centered around the salespeople so let’s assume you were responsible for British steel then we would expose you in videos and articles and you would be also the IDE generator of the content then obviously marketing people have different toolboxes and skills so marketing can add significant value to you but the original stories came from you and then the the main character in the stories whether it was videos or articles again was you so what happened was that the account representatives when when they went out to see people in those target accounts they were they receive this film stars so all of a sudden you come into meeting you noticed everyone in the room they feel that they know you you haven’t seen them effects like that so so you use use the the people on the ground put them in media use them as the front figures and don’t make the mistake of you using only the the name spokespersons like the CEO and the CEO and the CFO in that kind of communication use the people that like that particular account will meet so we did that really well Klieman during the last two years and we’re developing that now a proof where I run sales and marketing now and the most of the lead investor so going back to your role as a the decision-makers or at least an influencer when you were on the T side or as you are what is what works with when marketers want to reach out to you when salespeople want to reach out to you are you wanting them to reach out to the lower level people first the managers to get their their buy-in first or go directly to you look and then learn a call yesterday after they send you web stuff right so what really annoyed me when I was the CIO at the big fashion retailer was even the biggest names in the market doubt to me with the to junior person some kind of pre-sales and this is by the way big mistakes I don’t believe in that I think if you want to reach into your most pre prioritize accountants don’t put someone that starts to stutter when they reach the right person so I got really annoyed when they didn’t know who we were they couldn’t ask them so what do you know about retail and they’re like not bad but but in general what we’ve seen in the research and that probably applies to myself as well even improve we’re only 24 people but I want sales people to reach out to people below me because I I don’t have time to filter everything but then I also want my team to filter so they don’t because some people just say like oh here are all my d2d this to my boss and he send me send him an email and then some kind of shit email comes through and and then my team member hasn’t done a good job in filtering out thinks they’re irrelevant so but but it’s one simple thing together I respond straight then you probably seen this as well but like as soon as you can speak about that industry so the industry specificity say we’ll talk about the the big names in that industry what are the big trends and all that then all of a sudden the the receiver or what kind of regardless of its phone call or a marketing item of some kind it realizes that you you know what you’re talking about and then all of a sudden you’re so interesting like I mean a lot of Indian outsourcing companies are still sending emails where they list 23 capabilities like c-sharp asher blah blah blah blah they were just listing IT capabilities and then they’re asking for meat and you’re like right so i knowing about the industry but also mentioning a few words about the company where you work like i mean the company targeting so that you shall receive it that you’ve spent the time researching them what we’ve seen in our mega deals research is that it’s really relevant to try to figure out what the key initiatives are the target account so what are the top three to five key initiatives if you can hit one of those with your offering then your hit rate is tremendously higher so and those are often described in the annual report so by just scanning the annual reports you can figure out what the target accounts is having as a key strategy and what their programs are that are backing up the strategy and by then figuring out if you fit into one of those programs then you can have a really fast track into significant deals but if you go into a company where what you’re selling doesn’t touch upon any of their key initiatives you should probably exit and don’t even spend time with them and this is also behavior of the the best like highest performing mega dealers they are really good at both through quick research and reports but also in the first interactions with the customer actually working to to exit the discussion instead of so we intentionally use the word disqualify instead of qualify so you want to disqualify early and because it’s better to instead it to happen to disqualify too much that then too little because in the larger deal world each sales cycle is so expensive that you want to you you want you need to prioritize really hard and then once you have qualified them then you spend a lot of money on IBM and you pull in various resources from your company to to be to team up around the potential deal but before that you don’t spend much money again going back to the last two phases where ABM really make sense so from and so not to Legion right but to actually like okay we it’s not just a lead we have is not a man MQL it’s not masculinity on that so we have now spoken to the customer we really feel that this is a fit and we should start to allocate money towards this opportunity then you start to do Co some serious a compass marketing yeah so good advice it sounds like an outreach don’t need to junior people go use your strong sales people do your homework know the industry very well have done have some solutions for the industry know the the prospects hot points are there or their projects so how do you how do you find out what their projects are I mean don’t know they don’t lift them on the web anywhere well most public companies and many large deals are done with big become biz and many of the becomes our public so most public companies have and your report to you can you can download and in the annual reports you typically have a CEO letter and and you have some pages about strategy and quite often you find this kind of information in there so sometimes you need to do what we call research calls you need to call people within that account on lower level to try to figure out what the main initiatives are or the key initiatives and people often know this because they’re so important for that company that they are communicating about these key initiatives frequently but the c-suite is communicating frequently about them they’re monitoring them on various monthly monthly internally things and stuff so it’s actually not too tricky to find them out I mean it’s different when you target smaller companies they probably don’t even have key initiatives but once you target the bigger companies then then you’ll notice that it’s it’s not so hard to figure out and instill most sales America self people in marketeers are not even checking the annual report so if there’s one simple key takeaway from listening to this poll caste then start to look at any reports and you don’t have to go through all the numbers you just have to look at the ten fifteen pages are more about strategy and sometimes it’s less than that you find a lot of it it’s super valuable information there so we have we we have add comments like when we go and see in client they go oh you know more and most my staff about us and you only think you’ve done because most if you if you work in a fortune 500 companies I mean I and I would bet money on that ninety five percent of the staff never read the annual report so they’re not up to date with the strategy they’re not up to date with with all the details so so as soon as you do that and you mean someone’s senior they get is impressed I mean almost all high performers do it so if you were competing with high I mean really competitive people you will not be unique doing this but it to the on the others on the contrary if you don’t do it you’re out so but that’s a that’s a an important and easy takeaway from this podcast is to start reading annual reports and that trying to figure out what the key with the strategy is from your time for your target account and what kind of key initiatives they have that are backing up that strategy great advice thank you so what do you see as the future how are things heading in your mind in a year four or five years from now what are we gonna be talk about from a strategy perspective from a technology perspective from us from a legal privacy issues perspective the last point you’re racing is pretty key so so most kind of new and innovative things I see in ABM are kind of gray zone from a privacy point of view and since I’m European and GDP are is obviously very prescient for us like the data protection law and many international American companies need to be compliant with that as well even though the us-based so that is I mean some really I mean very active investor in more tech and coming like yeah you’ve been involved in a lot of market companies I want to have you as an investor and I they go through a brilliant idea but it’s immediately like yeah but that’s too intrusive they’re like is it mm-hmm yeah so I think that the what would what you’ll see in the next ten years is a big balance act and the battle between robotize ation and data and and privacy kind of those three battling and I mean robot isolation and they thought kind of hand-in-hand but many of the smart automations and really clever stuff you can do around an account quickly becomes sensitive to privacy one of the things I’ve done which i think is part of the future of ABM so I’m fairly large investor in a a rather young campus marketing campaign called NSYNC but has quickly grown 700% several years in a row where it’s kind of started off with display advertising through IP and then in sync also added all the for social channels so you can both target all employees by IP numbers but then you can display advertisement but then you can also target by a social posts using selections of people inside those accounts it’s really smart set up where you get the best of social the for social media channels and display advertising and then they’ve integrated that you’ve had rapid which is actually another investment of mine it’s an embedded platform for for for ads and ad templates so like banner snack and banner flow but completely build to be embedded into other platforms all of a sudden in one user interface you can decide okay I want to target this account I want to have out of the hundred messages and ads we have on when you see seven I want to want it to be visible both in normal media online but also in the for social media channels this is how you kind of often want to run canvas marking then on top of that you wanted to do some stuff there more like in mail and an email but but at these the media part of a campus marking you want to be run synchronized so in sync with a Zed they have done this really in a really smart way so they’re gaining momentum now and then a lot of the guys that are only doing IP and some smart data stuff are not covering enough because most people I’m sure you’ve notes this we we tend to spend more and more percentage of our time on the social channels and less and less on on the regular media channel so if you’re not incorporating your social channels in your account based marketing program it quickly becomes too weak so with the display advertising by IP LinkedIn Twitter Instagram and Facebook those four combined with IP and display is really powerful so maybe that’s it’s not it’s not super duper ultra innovative but it’s it’s kind of close to how you want it to run and you don’t have to have a big Orchestra of people to manage it you can run it with very few people industrialize IBM maybe have industrialized ABM is critical I mean moving it like we talked about before maybe getting to behaviors daily habits like has to be an integral part of your everyday work and then it has to be easy to manage and has to cover many things in one go yeah I’ve heard things about the Facebook for b2b but your what the challenges it seems the Facebook is a b2c sort of a product I mean that’s how I’m that’s how I position myself on Facebook yeah no totally so but the thing is what would you get with Facebook and Instagram its frequency so LinkedIn this is in theory the ultimate tool for you to be and for targeting I mean you can do really sophisticated selections as you know in anything but a lot of people are way too infrequently at LinkedIn so if you want to influence them you cannot rely on LinkedIn you need to blend it so you kind of use you use the strengths of LinkedIn but you then use that to build a bridge into also Instagram and Facebook and what we would we see anyway is some really good results combining these even though them they are seen as consumer channels but they have such a high frequency and also lower price per exposure that it kind of makes sense but in that it doesn’t mean it’s for all but what we’ve done in instinct is that you can choose you say ok I want to use display and LinkedIn and Twitter that’s the three I want to use so I want to say okay I want to use display Instagram and Facebook that’s fine as well you can make whatever combination you want but the key the key is that more and more people are spending an awful lot of time on social media and less and less on traditional online media and LinkedIn as the kind of ultimate b2b channel has to low frequency for too high proportion of all the people you want to influence so to bridge that you need to mix you need to mix it let’s go I see it we’ll move forward I also see some really smart tools on how to automate so kind of so there’s one company cooking it’s not even launched but I’m I’m an advisor there where it’s kind of creating marketing automation that’s social media based so much like the yellow quartz and the mark arrows but and they’re very I mean they’re fundamentally built around email even though they try to branch out into multi-channel but it’s still you can see the heritage even in there where is this there’s a new genre of marketing automation companies that are more in mail and Facebook messaging I mean that the social media channels are the core of the product and not an extension that’s also something because social selling Enterprise style is really complementary to account as marketing if you want to win bigger deals this is really working well in our book in our book we have a lot of how to combine those beautiful is that company in stealth mode or are you able to share who that is so in sync is not in stealth mode that’s the accomplice marketing company the the the the marketing automation company for social media I mean kind of built around social media it does include you know the others but it that’s in stealth mode still but I I will probably be on the board of some I mean I the chairman or board member of that company and it’s a real balance act to not become about GDP are not to become too intrusive but it’s kind of finding that balance of how close you can come without breaking the law yep make sense beautiful well this has been awesome Christopher any final words of wisdom otherwise I’ll let you go enjoy those those wonderful kids I think keep it simple and try to scale it and then it’s so tempting to over complicate it and then get stuck in in details not getting anywhere so that’s my 10 year of Abyan experience great advice thank you thank you again for your time and other courses between you and Boston next month yeah and that will be a pleasure I truly look forward to it and I am Boston in such a cool town one of my best friends going to Harvard that I was there for one of my most fun weeks ever was at Harvard Business School as a guest it’s a good time it’s a good time you see very good pleasure Christopher I’ll see you soon thank you cool figure taker